Could you "Fusion" RAID0 + HDD?

mmomega said:

I have 2 Samsung 830 drives(RAID0) in my '11 iMac+ a Western Digital Caviar Black HDD.
The thought popped in my head earlier but since I am away from home atm I am wondering if it is possible?

Has anyone else even tried a RAID0+HDD Fusion?

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From OWC:
"According to our techs, when using any version of Disk Utility other than the one that came with the 2012 Mac mini, it will appear as though you have a Fusion Drive, but it will not behave as such. You would be essentially creating a standard Core Storage volume rather than Fusion. Effectively, once the SSD fills, you’re running at HDD speed for good; there is no 4GB migration or smart movement of data. That migration, of course is what Fusion is all about. Our results were as described – the SSD fills, then information is moved to the HDD until 4GB is free on the SSD again. The “smartness” of this data transfer is something that will likely need to be determined over time. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to say exactly what files are where on the drive, so direct measurement of “smartness” of data doesn’t seem to be in the picture at this time. However, usage and performance over time should be indicators of the actual efficacy of this kind of drive."
Fusion works only with mac minis or iMacs 2012....
2011 machine -->no Fusion

Ugh, I hadn't read that. I'm running a "Fusion drive" in my '09 mini; everything set up correctly and APPEARS to be working as planned, but I haven't filled up my SSD yet (everything lives on my server). Gonna have to fill that SSD up and see what happens...

@OP, when I created mine it simply merged the volumes. My guess would be that YES, you could use the three drives, but your RAID0 would be gone; you'd simply have a 3 drive Fusion setup.

mmomega said:

That was what I was wondering, if the RAID0 read write speeds would go away and go back to single SSD speeds. Hmmmmm...

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Purely a guess, but from my VERY LIMITED experience I would say yes. Gotta test my homemade Fusion when I get home. If it slows down to HDD speeds after the SSD size (only 60GB in my case), then I'll just stripe a pair of SSDs, since I have two matching 60's anyway - just wanted to use Fusion b/c 1) it's new and cool and 2) to give me a little more local storage in case something happened to my server. Oh well; we shall see. 😀

Ahh, striped SSDs will be faster anyway. 😛